“They used to baptize us down here,” George says as we wind past Lake Eustis. “To the left are the water oak trees.”
We drive farther out. The land is wild scrub brush broken by stands of domed trees, the citrus that ruled their lives growing up.
“Over to the right, over here was woods,” George says, “just like you see to the right, but they cleared that up.”
“Here go the seedling groves,” Reuben says.
“Is that Lake Ale there?”
“That Lake Ale. Those seedling groves right in here had all them pecan trees.”
“Was this the Natural?” George asks of the legendary grove that has withstood the worst winters and hardest of freezes.
“The Natural’s out there by Emaraldi Island.”
“I told you Reuben would know where everything is,” George says, turning in my direction.
“If you dropped an orange in the Natural Grove, five minutes and it would just be hittin’ the ground. You could get up in one of those trees and look all over this south Florida.”
“This is Ole Jones’ place.”
“I picked in that grove where I had a thirty-six-foot ladder spliced with a twenty-six-foot ladder, and it just reached the bottom limb.”
“That’s right. All us here, Charlie, Mud, me, we used to hunt coons and possum ’long here.”
We drive further and further out.
“This here is Ole Cannon Grove.”
“This is not the way it looked before the last big freeze,” George says. “This is new. They reset, they put new trees there.”
“All this here was froze out.”
“Nineteen eighty-nine, it snowed in Florida. Had two and three inches of snow.”
“Have you ever seen a forest that would burn out with a fire?” George asks me. “Well, that’s just the way those trees look. Them trees looked just like somebody went through there with a flamethrower.”
George comes back to Eustis every two years for the biennial reunion of Curtwright Colored High School. He always comes down on the train he once worked. It’s owned by Amtrak now and, as a pensioner with thirty-five years of service, he gets to ride for free. He can finally sit like the passengers he served and look out the window to see what they saw, reliving with each trip the migration he made all those years ago.
When George returns to Eustis, he is looked upon with a distant kind of respect. He was one of them once, but he chose a different path, knows things they couldn’t know, survived in a place where they’re not sure they could make it. He’s been gone so long that whatever he knows about Eustis is either frozen in the 1940s or distorted through the secondhand recounting in long-distance phone calls and letters and rumor. He’s fuzzy on some of the names of the people who live there now.
Whole generations have been born since he left, and he searches out his connections to them, the ways he might know them—through a grandparent, great-aunt, or second cousin of theirs whom he grew up with but who may not be around anymore. He stays with Viola, the widow of his deceased stepbrother, and spends much of his time visiting with the few people who were around when he was here, reliving those days, and catching up on the things he has missed. When people hear that he’s in town, they head over to Viola’s bungalow and remove their hats before they walk in to see a prodigal son of Eustis.
It is Sunday on the July weekend of the high school reunion, and George puts on his burgundy polyester suit, burgundy tie, burgundy socks, and white straw hat to worship at the church he grew up in as a boy and where the doomed Harry T. Moore recruited him in the early drive for equal rights. Seventy parishioners take their places in the dark wood pews affixed to orange carpet.
Pastor William Hawkins beseeches the congregation to take up a special plate for the black churches that have recently been burned throughout the South. It is as if it is 1963 again.
“We ought to do something to assist them,” he says. “And this is one of the reasons we better secure our own church.”
People pull out money to give to the other churches and pray that they won’t be next. The choir motions for George to come forward and sing the solo for the collection.
“What you give, what more He gives to you,” he sings.
Then the pastor turns to George. “We are always glad to see our member from New York,” Reverend Hawkins says, motioning to George to come to the pulpit to speak.
George stands before the congregation of mostly new faces, the descendants of those he knew, and looks around at a church that was as much a part of him as the South itself.
“Needless to say, I am grateful to be in your midst,” he says. “I look over and see my father and my mother and my daughter. And it always makes me a little full. So if I become emotional, I hope you will understand.”
He then sings a hymn, “Without God I could do nothing … without him, I would fail.…”
The congregation claps after he finishes, and he takes his glasses off and wipes the tears with his handkerchief before walking back to his seat at the side of the church. He takes his place and sits upright in a pew next to the pulpit with a silver cane beside him and tears escaping from his eyes.
LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 23, 1996
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
THE REGULARLY SCHEDULED BIMONTHLY MEETING of the Monroe, Louisiana, Club of Los Angeles, California, is not so much called to order as roused to life when ten of the sixteen surviving and currently active members trickle into the bungalow of Leo and Era Davis on Ninety-third Street east of Crenshaw. They gather in the Davises’ den with the circular metal staircase and prepare to catch up with one another and with news from back home in Monroe.
It is surely one of the smallest Louisiana clubs in the city, not to mention its being overshadowed by all the Texas Clubs around town. “We’re a dying breed,” says Limuary Jordan, a club member who left Louisiana in his DeSoto more than half a century before. “It’s a fact. Everybody in the club is over sixty. And without any new Monroe people … there are Monroe people here, but they don’t affiliate with us. They don’t belong to no club. So we are of a particular time.”
“A lot of them don’t have anything to do with the South,” his wife, Adeline, says. “A lot of them, when they left, they were gone.”
The few members who are still active approach the club with a sense of formality and ritual. Robert Foster had to secure approval beforehand to invite a guest, who brings the attendance at today’s meeting to eleven. As the graying expatriates from Monroe begin to take their seats, I explain my presence as his guest and tell them about my work on the Great Migration. They listen without emotion or much in the way of comment, not seeing exactly what the Migration has to do with them, even though they had all been right in the middle of it. At the appointed hour, John Collins, whom they just call Collins, stands up like a proper reverend and prays stiffly in his black suit and gray vest and fedora.
“Lord, we thank you for this food we are about to receive, and we thank you for another day,” he begins. “We pray for the lady visitor and the book she’s trying to put together. Give her knowledge and wisdom and watch over her. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
Spread out before the assembled are oxtails, collard greens, corn bread, sweet potatoes, potato salad, red beans and rice, and pound cake on an orange tablecloth in the wood-paneled dining room.
It is a time of unaccustomed quiet in the city after so much upheaval. The Rodney King beating, police acquittals, and ensuing riots were only a few years back, the business districts of South Central still in recovery. The people have been divided and whipsawed by the O. J. Simpson trial, the saga of a once-loved black football player acquitted of killing his white wife and her friend, the people by now just wishing the whole thing would go away but unable to escape it, billboards and headlines in every direction.
That very day, Robert passed a newspaper box with a poster about the O.J. trial. “I’m so sick of O.J.,” he said, “I don’t know what to do. They have
choked us with this.”
No one in the Monroe Club wants to talk about it. Instead, as if on cue, the never-ending loop of how people are faring back home and in Los Angeles and what they have been through in both places picks up where it left off from the last meeting as if it were fresh and new and has never come up before.
“If you look at it,” Howard Beckwith begins, “we in the same instance as in the South. They throwing them in jail just like the South. The jails filled with colored people. The South has made a desperate change. Things you couldn’t do in the South, you can do now. You can walk down the street with a white woman. The mayor is black.”
“Who’s that?” someone asks.
“You know Dr. Pierce what run the drugstore,” Beckwith says. “One of his sons.”
“No, it’s not,” someone breaks in, one-upping Beckwith and trying to prove who has the better connections to a place they still feel tied to even if nobody else cares about the distinctions. “It’s one of Dr. Pierce’s cousin’s sons. The cousin of Dr. Pierce, one of his sons.”
“That’s Eliza Davis’s son,” a woman whispers to me by way of explanation. “She was my classmate,” she wants me to know.
Somehow the line of conversation reminds Collins about being black in the South and the talk turns to a kind of testifying rather than an interaction, each member reciting an experience independent from the others and at times seemingly unrelated. Here it is, fifty years after most of them left, and they can’t stop talking about the South. They are exiles with ties to two worlds, still obsessed with the Old Country, and have never let it go.
Collins tells them about the time a white man slapped a ladle of water out of his hand as he was taking a drink. A woman describes being home from college and a policeman coming up and asking why she wasn’t picking cotton or in the kitchen. Someone else mentions the movable sign on the trolley car and how “you had to sit and look at that sign that said ‘Colored.’ ” Everyone nods in recognition.
Marshall brings up the segregated lines and the swiveling ticket agent at the Paramount Theater again. “The woman in the ticket counter swiveled to the white side to sell tickets and then swiveled to the colored,” he says. “We walked up all those flights of stairs.”
“That’s all over the South,” Beckwith says. “You didn’t know nothing different.”
Robert breaks in, momentarily distracted by the meal. “Era, what did you do with the oxtail? It’s out of sight.”
“Cake and ice cream? Cake and ice cream?” Mrs. Davis asks with a sugar voice, cake held up high.
Marshall then remembers an incident at Woolworth’s, a seemingly small thing that let him know he was not meant to stay in the South.
“A white girl waited on me and gave me a token for my change,” Marshall begins. “I went to tell on the woman, that she had taken my money and given me a token back that was worthless. All I got was the satisfaction of telling the man and of telling my mother when I got home.”
He recounted what his mother told him: “You’re going to have to leave this place, you keep that up.”
Which is why Marshall ended up in California.
Then Robert joins in. “I had taken my bath in the tin tub,” he begins. “I was clean.”
“Was that the Saturday-night bath?” Beckwith’s wife, Isabel, asks.
Everyone laughs in recognition. Like most black people in the South, none of them had had indoor plumbing back then, and Saturday was the one night in the week when they could manage the time-consuming ritual of boiling water from the well and filling a tin tub so everyone in a given family could take a bath.
They knew just what Robert meant. They let him finish his story.
“A white man called me over,” Robert goes on. “ ‘Hey, boy, I’ll pay you if you can tell me where I can find a clean colored girl.’ ”
He pauses for effect.
“I told him, ‘I’ll get you one if you get me your mother.’ ”
“Foster, did you really say that?”
“So help me God.”
“You lucky to be alive.”
AND, PERHAPS, TO BLOOM
Most of them care nothing whatever about race.19
They want only their proper place in the sun
and the right to be left alone,
like any other citizen of the republic.
— JAMES BALDWIN, Notes of a Native Son
CHICAGO, 1997
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
IDA MAE SETS HONEY on the window screen in her yellow-tiled kitchen to feed the bees. She gives away tiny seeds of four-o’-clocks and morning glories. They are a wonder to her, waking up as they do at the same time every day, more reliable than the best-intentioned people.
In her kitchen, she cooks no differently than if she were in Mississippi, folding the eggs and sugar, butter and nutmeg into softened sweet potatoes to make sweet potato pie, boiling her collards and mustard greens with ham hocks until they are rich and satiny and then making the corn bread to go with them. She has no use for recipes. It’s all in her memory from what Miss Theenie taught her and her sisters-in-law back in Mississippi. She sifts cornmeal, white flour, a little baking powder, and a palmful of salt into a tin pan. She stirs in six eggs, sprinkles in a little sugar, and spreads a pool of vegetable oil in the baking pan before pouring in the batter.
Not too long ago, Eleanor went down south with a friend and came back reporting that the people were using self-rising meal for their corn bread in Mississippi now. Ida Mae didn’t know what to make of it. She would have to rethink what she was doing. It was a revolutionary break from how they did things when she was there. For generations, they had used plain old cornmeal, back to slavery days, when that was all that they had. Everything in the recipes in their heads called for it. For years, they’d had self-rising meal in the North, but Ida Mae never tried it because that’s not what they used down south when she was coming up. It wouldn’t be authentic. But Ida Mae thought she might as well try it if that was the way they were doing things now. So she and Eleanor went out and bought some self-rising meal, and Ida Mae tried it. But the corn bread rose up like a pound cake. She wasn’t sure if it was this newfangled meal or how she used it, but she never did try it again.
On this day, she puts the corn bread, made the way it was when she was coming up, into the oven and waits for it to bake. The corn bread grows plump and golden, and Ida Mae pulls it out when it is ready.
“Now you put you some butter and some buttermilk on it,” she says, “and it make you want to hurt yourself.”
At this stage of her life, the kitchen, where she whips up from memory the staples of the South, and the living room, where she monitors the streets of the North, are the center of her everyday world. Lately the invitations she gets are not to the weddings and baby showers of the young but to the funerals and wakes of her dwindling generation. It seems as though every week someone is admitted to the hospital or being eulogized. As she’s the healthiest one in her circle of friends and the oldest member of her extended family, everyone expects to see her in their moments of grief.
She has just heard that another sister-in-law, Dessie, has died, and Ida Mae is getting ready to go to her funeral. The news hurls her back to the Pearson plantation in Mississippi, she and Dessie stopping to pick blackberries and Dessie teaching her how to make blackberry cobbler and tomato pie. She remembers being a young bride in a strange world, of all her husband’s people on the plantation, all the brothers and their wives, the sisters and their kids, and how they took to her and brought her into their family.
“All them dead now,” she says of her husband’s generation of brothers and sisters.
The descendants want her to speak at the funeral since she is the oldest one left. Ida Mae doesn’t like to dwell on the past or get mired in sadness. She doesn’t want to do it.
“It’s nothing I can say,” she says. “Nothing I can say can bring her back.”
She’s beginning to dread funerals alto
gether but will go to this one and do what is expected of her. She will console the living, but it’s getting harder and harder.
“I don’t like going to funerals anymore,” she says. “If it’s sad, it just tears me to pieces.”
One day she gets word that her beloved nephew Robert, whom they call Saint and who helped her and her family get out of Mississippi sixty years ago, has suffered a stroke. What is worse, his wife, Catherine, had a stroke just before he did. He had gone to the hospital every day to check on his wife before being stricken himself and each time was heartbroken over her blank stares and unmovable limbs. Now the two of them are separated for the first time in their marriage, she in the hospital, he in rehab. Ida Mae has to visit them both.
Today she is going to see Saint at a rehabilitation center at Ninety-fifth and Cicero. Saint had helped Ida Mae and her husband sell the things they didn’t have time to dispense with or that, had they tried, would have attracted unwanted attention as they plotted their escape. He ended up following them up to Chicago with his wife and family in 1943, and they stayed with Ida Mae and George, as was the tradition among people migrating from the South, until they could get on their feet.
“I decided to come up because I had people up here,” he is saying, sitting in his wheelchair. “People were coming up. I got in the crowd.”
Saint and Ida Mae start reminiscing about the people they know from back home, how they are faring, who’s a deacon now, who’s moved into a nursing home, who’s moved in with their grown kids out in the suburbs.
“It’s a shame we all here and don’t see each other,” Robert says.
Then it hits him that he can’t see his wife either. He starts to look down, and his eyes get moist. It’s been the saddest of years, his wife taking sick and now him in a wheelchair from a stroke just like she had. His eyes well up.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Page 56